Narcel Reedus

Born in Gary, Indiana, Narcel G. Reedus is a writer, director, independent filmmaker and media artist. He has won national awards for his dramatic short films “For Colored Boys Who’ve Considered Homicide,” “Race Juice: An Elixir for the Soul,” “Waddie Welcome” and “The Fight.” He also won a Peabody for his writing on the NPR radio documentary “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” His films have screened at the Lincoln Center in New York, on PBS, in Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta and in international film festivals in Rotterdam, Bermuda, Milan and Berlin. Narcel earned his MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and taught film at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Narcel says:

I don’t remember when I first fell in love with film. It may have been in elementary school when we took a field trip to Chicago to see Sounder. Maybe in 1972 when I first saw Shaft at the State Theatre in Gary, Indiana. Perhaps it was at my first screening of The Fight when a woman gasped at the images I created on screen.

My relationship with film is co-dependent, enduring, therapy, romantic, beautiful, and heart wrenching. I’ve discovered film intertwined within my tragedies and my personal life intertwined within my films. I am somehow connected to the unspoken, the underrepresented, and the hard to see. I feel a deep responsibility to make silence and the blatantly unobvious the hero.

In the fall of 2009, Narcel relocated to Atlanta and began production on “Nine in Alabama,” a feature-length documentary about children sent to live in nursing homes.

That project grew into the larger project, the “Not Home” documentary, where Narcel travels the United States chronicling the history and issue of children being housed in nursing homes.

Learn more about Narcel Reedus and the “Not Home” documentary project, by going to his blog.